A Short Film Screenplay

This is a short film that I wrote a little while ago. One night I couldn’t sleep and had the urge to write something, with the aid of a little book called The Writers Block I found a concept to write about and turned it into a short film. I kind of cheated…you’re meant to open it to a random page and write whatever it tells you to, I flicked through until I found one I liked!

I eventually opened to a page that said “write about the journey of a five pound note as it passes through the possession of five different people”. Just as I was about to go straight past it and look for something else I thought ‘actually, that could be really interesting.

A short film I had watched just a few weeks prior to writing this kind of reminded me of the concept, it’s called The Black Balloon. It was screened at the Future Shorts Festival that Coventry University hosted before Christmas. In it this black balloon that appears to have a life of its own attaches itself to various different people, giving us a brief insight into their lives. I thought the idea of exploring several characters and just seeing a snippet of their lives was a really interesting one, and set about planning my characters.

The characters are all very different, some more realistic and relatable than others, all of varying ages. It’s set in a small community, and there’s an obvious closeness between all the characters who somehow manage to gain possession of the same five pound note through various transactions. I decided to avoid hinting too much at the background of each character, just dip into their lives very briefly and look at it from the present…so it’s ambiguous as to their backgrounds and what led them to where they are.

I’m pretty happy with it, although I’m thinking of scrapping the last two characters and maybe changing them for something more interesting but I’m undecided at the moment! This is a second or third draft, I edited some parts last night (albeit around midnight so I probably wasn’t thinking straight!) and will no doubt do another couple of edits before I’m completely happy with it.

Linked it as a PDF because the format goes all out of whack if I paste it in to the post!

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